Archives for October 2015

A couple of weeks ago, Walthamstow town centre was apparently in the grip of a crisis. For four hours, following reports of a ‘huge riot’ involving 200 young people, this busy part of north-east London came to a standstill as police lined the streets. It wasn’t until later that the police released a statement admitting that ‘there has been no riot’ and that officers were only responding to ‘calls about a fight’, which meant that ‘several police resources [including riot vans] were deployed’. The teenagers ‘were not committing offences but their presence in such numbers would be alarming to members of the public’, the statement concluded. By this time, wobbly video footage of girls fighting (over a boy apparently) on pavements strewn with yanked-out hair extensions were doing the rounds on social media.

You might think this bizarre event was a one-off, that the police wouldn’t usually go into full riot mode because a handful of girls, egged on by their mates, were scrapping in the streets. But you’d be wrong. The powers granted under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 effectively allow local authorities to outlaw any activities they judge to have a ‘detrimental effect on the quality of life of those in the locality’. The scope of this law, and the summary justice it allows the authorities to exercise, is unprecedented. It allows the authorities to target particular individuals or entire populations in an area subject to a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO). PSPOs usually focus on those deemed an ongoing ‘nuisance’, such as the homeless, who have been targeted by councils that have introduced orders for drinking alcohol in public, busking without prior approval or for simply sleeping rough. But now anything, from skateboarding to walking your dog, could be enough to leave you facing an on-the-spot fine of £100.

There is something perverse about protecting public spaces from the public – and therefore the public from each other. It deprives public space of its content and the public of spaces in which to meet. Our over-anxious, mistrustful culture has encouraged an accumulation of petty restrictions and protections, from PSPOs to vetting anybody who comes near a so-called vulnerable person. Local authorities claim to speak on behalf of citizens, but in reality they have little to no relationship with ordinary people, with the exception of those they deem vulnerable, a nuisance, or both.

When Hackney Council targeted the homeless for sleeping rough in hipster-hotspot Broadway Market, homeless charity Crisis attacked the council for demonising the homeless because ‘they may have suffered a relationship breakdown, a bereavement or domestic abuse’. Homeless Link also described rough sleepers as ‘extremely vulnerable’. After much criticism, the council backed down. But were campaigners right to be so emotive? In the debate about PSPOs, both sides play the vulnerability card. But this only serves to reinforce a state-endorsed fear of ourselves and each other – depriving us all of the opportunity to interact freely.

Some campaigners reserve particular criticism for ‘privately owned public spaces’ (POPS) – those shiny new additions to our neighbourhoods that have prompted the launch of some PSPOs. But these developments are often welcomed by residents for what they bring to otherwise run-down areas. The privatisation we should really be concerned about is that which isolates people from each other and inhibits community life.

Not so long ago support for a minimum wage, much like nationalisation of the railways and unilateral disarmament, marked you out as a state socialist. Today the Living Wage is the new common sense. While there is some opposition from employers, it is striking that the government and the bulk of the political establishment only quibble over the level at which it should be set.

It currently stands at a recommended £7.85 an hour, or £9.15 an hour in London. The National Living Wage, to be introduced by the government in April, will be a little less at £7.20 for over-25s rising to £9 by 2020.

While no-one had heard of zero-hours contracts until recently, taking a laissez-faire or state interventionist stance on the labour market would once have had you fall either side of a clear political divide too. No longer. Today, all are agreed that what amounts to casual working needs more or less regulating.

“Those exclusive zero-hours contracts that left people unable to build decent lives for themselves – we will scrap them.” That wasn’t Red Ed or Corbynomics: that’s David Cameron.

While the critics might want him to go further and ban them outright there is a consensus. The main political parties are opposed to the worst excesses of ‘poverty pay’, and agree that something must be done about it. But is this really such a good thing? It seems to me that this statist meeting of minds is shaped less by the fair-mindedness of the political elite than by the self-imposed limits of our anaemic political culture.

Clueless about solving the bigger problems, and unable to inspire anything but contempt, politicians desperately jostle around for easy headline-grabbing interventions like these. For instance, Culture Secretary John Whittingdale has told Premier League football clubs they should pay their staff a Living Wage. “It would,” he says, “be difficult to argue they can’t afford it”.

Meanwhile, Costa has announced it will pay its staff a Living Wage slightly more generous than the national one. But why stop there? Living standards, especially for the poorest, have plummeted in recent times as wages have fallen and prices have risen. Is this really the best they can do?

It is a depressing sign of the times that such gesture politics can be spun as good news. In the absence of capitalist dynamism to raise people’s standard of living, this is all there is. There is no appeal to trickle-down economics anymore: an optimistic if not unreasonable belief that we all benefit as the economy grows.

Baristas are supposed to be happy with their new minimum (sorry, living) wage rather than imagine a world in which they might live like barristers or millionaire footballers. Instead of ambitions for more and better, the adolescent cry of “it’s not fair!” can be heard.

In a recent poll of students by job site Glassdoor, a third thought zero hours contracts were exploitative, a quarter wanted them banned, and over a third of those offered one turned it down.

As Diarmuid Russell at Glassdoor said: “These findings are intriguing, given these contracts allow students to move in and out of the job throughout the year, and potentially pick up hours which fit around studies and holidays.”

Quite – you might expect those who never tire of telling us about their spiralling debts to be a little less picky.

It isn’t just students convinced of their own victimhood. A chef who used to work for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was recently in court having being apprehended by police at a drug dealer’s house. According to his defence lawyer ‘it wasn’t him what did it’ – it was the zero-hours contract he signed with River Cottage. “As a result [he] was suffering from depression and sadly relapsed into heroin use,” it was claimed.

So as well as the notion that the best the poorest can hope for is to be a bit less badly off, is the patronising idea that some of us (chefs and students included) are so fragile that we couldn’t cope with a zero-hours contract anyway. While critics rightly argue that such employers are subsidised by us all in the end as those who work for them have to rely on welfare top-ups to their meagre incomes, this is only part of the problem with the official narrative on poverty pay.

What matters more is that the entire political elite, convinced that the poorest sections of the working class need protecting from the inequities of a flexible labour market, are telling us that this is as good as it gets.

Vaping, says the review, is 95% safer than smoking cigarettes. Who could object to the view that smokers be encouraged to get vaping, especially if they are already thinking of giving up what is well understood to be a bad habit?

But the World Health Organisation and European Union are set on banning e-cigarettes, and just a couple of months ago the Welsh government announced it wanted to ban e-cigarettes in enclosed spaces, arguing that they act as a “gateway” to the tobacco-filled variety. These dubious claims – rubbished in PHE’s review of the evidence – have been used to justify threatened clampdowns.

Meanwhile in Britain, something like 2.5 million smokers have taken the lead by switching to this much safer alternative. In other words, they have proved more adept at looking after their own health than those charged with the public’s health. As many as half a million smokers, according to Ash, have switched in the last year alone. On the face of it, a section of the public health establishment has come to its senses and followed suit.

But while making e-cigarettes available on prescription is quite a turnaround, it is more in keeping with the urge to regulate than to promote smokers’ health. Indeed this new-found enthusiasm for vaping is as likely to raise prices, as e-cigarettes acquire medicinal status, as help smokers do what they are already doing anyway.

The case of vaping is not atypical of a confusion at the heart of health policy. On the one hand, promoting people’s “independence, choice and control” has become a mantra in health (and social care) circles. On the other, the assumption that the public cannot be trusted to make even the most basic decisions about how they live their everyday lives dominates public health thinking. As one GP pleaded recently, her waiting room of patients is already impossibly demanding without also “trying to remember that [she’s] meant to tell smokers to stop smoking, drinkers to stop drinking, and to wave a wand at obesity” too. And that’s just three items on a very long list.

Hasn’t general practice got enough to do without having to prescribe e-cigarettes as well? The controversy over vaping is just one of many instances where public health dogmatism is coming up against people’s autonomy. With the exception of GPs helping those patients who need it to manage a long-term condition, or to prevent one getting worse, are the lifestyles of patients really anybody else’s business?

It is one thing to rightly insist that the NHS change from being a “sickness service” that reacts rather than prevents (reducing infections, preventing falls and avoiding unnecessary hospital admissions). It is quite another to insist that people must be kept well whether they like it or not. The health service is supposed to be in the business of promoting, not robbing people of, their capacity to run their own lives – and that means recognising their ability to make unhealthy choices.

There is a contradiction at the heart of the policy agenda, where a rhetorical commitment to patient choice turns out to be fatally compromised by a paternalism that the health service claims to have abandoned. Patronising people and protecting them from themselves just won’t wash anymore. If we choose to smoke or vape, or drink or eat too much, that should be up to us.

Dave Clements Limited

I am a writer and consultant with over fifteen years experience working in senior strategic, management, project and engagement roles, and advising local government, the NHS and other public sector and VCS organisations. I am available for commissions.